Here’s the third (and final) part of our review of Heavy Reading’s recent OSS in the Era of NFV/SDN conference in London. Even if the event raised many more questions than it provided answers, that alone is a pointer to the present state of virtualisation in telco networks.

I published some of my initial thoughts from Berlin, where I attended Informa’s recent Policy Control conference, a couple of weeks ago. Having now had a little more time to reflect on various conversations, here’s a little more analysis and insight.

Last week, I attended (and participated in a panel discussion at) Informa’s Policy event in Berlin. Some interesting discussion points were raised. Here are my thoughts on some of them in a two-part blog, the second half of which will be published next week.

“Why Policy Now?” and “How do I get the Policy decision right?” Those are the two central questions that’ll be addressed by DigitalRoute’s upcoming webinar on the new Computarisinformation platform. Most of us in the industry know that Policy Control has been an attention-grabbing topic for the past couple of years at least, but as is often the case the early solutions to market have raised as many questions as they’ve solved problems. Indeed, one analyst told us recently that over 200 PCRF solutions had been identified, but doubted more than a handful were in any way valid or fit-for-the-purpose.

With full rollout of 4G LTE networks globally coming in 2013, Voice is threatening to become the killer app that redefines the communications landscape. If, as predicted, Voice over LTE takes off, the service provider’s traditional hand could quickly become significantly devalued in an entirely new, high-stakes poker game for market share. In the data network, minutes won’t matter anymore meaning traditional billing and charging paradigms (and their supporting BSS infrastructures) could become irrelevant while, simultaneously, mediation – the means of collecting and aggregating the data – will come to the fore as that challenge takes on new dimensions.